Good medical practice: professionalism, ethics and law. Kerry J Breen, Stephen M Cordner, Colin J H Thomson, Vernon D Plueckhahn. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2010 (462 pp). ISBN 9780521183413.

I like this book. Its starting point is a recognition of medicine as a true profession — that is, an activity which, being concerned with deeply personal problems, is aimed at serving people in a manner which enables them to act on their own. Its subject matter is the pursuit of this honourable goal in a world in which resources are finite, medical practice is increasingly undermined by corporatisation, accountability threatens to become an end in itself and the community expects that treatment will always be successful. Its achievement is an informative sketch of what a doctor needs to know and do, over and above the adequate knowledge and practice of medical science, if he or she is to live out the Hippocratic commitment to the “benefit of the sick” in 21st-century Australia.

The authors are specialist practitioners in both the medical and the legal professions, so the book is ethically informed without focusing on questions of ethical theory.

After a brief introduction to forms of ethical thinking and the qualities of good doctors, the authors explain the professional and regulatory standards that structure and constrain medical practice today.

Clarity is one of the authors’ virtues. They explain in advance which issues will be covered by their discussions and which won’t. Chapter 7, for instance, on negligence, professional liability and adverse events, aims to assist doctors to understand our current legal system for handling claims for damages and the closely associated system of professional medical indemnity (both of which have been the subject of considerable change in recent years). It describes a change in the notion of “negligent conduct” without debating the merits of the change. And in Chapter 19, on determining and certifying death and reporting deaths to the coroner, obligations deriving from the law in each jurisdiction are set out so as to reveal both common threads in the various laws and differences in detail between them. This book will truly be a useful and accessible guide for busy doctors.

As I say, I like this book. (Reader, beware! I am one of many acknowledged in the credits.)